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Our mother’s double life
Suranne Jones and Eve Best play sisters facing a tsunami of secrets after their mother dies, in tense new thriller Maryland
Suranne Jones took a deep dive into the murky waters of international espionage in hit nuclear submarine drama Vigil, and this week she submerges herself in another secretive world. In intriguing new ITV drama Maryland, Suranne plays Becca, a woman who discovers that her mother, Mary, had a life that neither she nor her elder sister Rosaline (Nurse Jackie’s Eve Best) knew anything about, which comes to light only after Mary’s death.
Over the course of three episodes the layers of her mother’s incredible ‘other’ world, including a house and a partner on the Isle of Man and a circle of close friends built up over years, are slowly peeled back to reveal some extraordinary family secrets.
‘Becca and Rosaline are stunned when they find out their mother had been leading this other life, completely away from her husband and the family home in Manchester,’ explains Suranne, who also co-created the drama, which is being shown on three consecutive nights from Monday. ‘And they’re even more amazed when her best friend, Cathy – played by Hollywood star Stockard Channing – tells them the reason she came to the
Isle of Man in the first place.’
The show begins with the shocking news that Becca and Rosaline’s mother has been found dead on a beach on the Isle of Man, so the sisters fly there to repatriate her body to mainland Britain. The holiday photographs she’d been sending the pair of them, supposedly from Anglesey in North Wales, turn out to show stunning views of the Isle of Man and Bayview, the name of the house the taxi driver takes them to when they first arrive on the island. They assumed it was a bed and breakfast, but it’s actually owned by their mother.
The astonishing revelations about Mary’s life then start to tumble out. After being taken aback by photographs of themselves as girls on the walls at Bayview, the sisters are further stunned by revelations about parents, grandparents… and some very mysterious musicians.
The first episode also introduces us to Becca and Rosaline’s father, Richard (Happy Valley’s George Costigan), who appears to have known about Mary’s other life – and wasn’t happy about it. ‘He’s in denial,’ says Anne-marie O’connor, the scriptwriter who cocreated the drama with Suranne. ‘He’s like a king in a crumbling castle who will accept what Mary has done as long as he can hold up his head at the golf club and stay in his three-bed semi-detached home.’
We also meet Pete (Holby City’s Hugh Quarshie), who shared Mary’s life on the Isle of Man, although he’s reluctant to talk to the sisters about their mother and it’s left to Cathy, Stockard Channing’s character, to fill in the gaps.
It isn’t Stockard’s first role on British TV – she played Elizabeth Taylor in Sky’s Urban Myths series in 2017 – but it’s still quite a coup to land the actress who famously played Rizzo in classic movie Grease. ‘We were determined to make it happen,’ says Suranne. ‘We’d sit in the writers’ room and say, “And
Cathy is played by
Stockard Channing” in the hope that if we said it often enough it would come true. And thanks to the brilliance of our casting director, Andy Pryor, it did!’ Almost inevitably there’s some scene-stealing by Stockard, 79, but Suranne didn’t mind that. After taking leading roles in Vigil and Gentleman Jack, she was happy to step back a little and play someone not quite so front and centre. ‘I could have played either of the sisters but I went for the younger one because she’s dragged along by events rather than being all clued up and running the show in the way that some of my recent TV characters have been,’ says Suranne. ‘Amy Silva in Vigil and Anne Lister in Gentleman Jack were confident and on the front foot, whereas Becca is wound up and stressed in episode one – but slowly unwinds in episodes two and three.’
She says the drama, which is directed by Sue Tully (Michelle Fowler in Eastenders during her acting days), is not based on anything from her own life (Suranne is married to writer Laurence Akers and they have a seven-year-old son). It’s simply the idea of someone leading an existence they’ve managed to keep entirely separate from close relatives that intrigued her most. ‘That was the start of the project,’ she says. ‘I don’t know how my husband will take this, but I’m absolutely intrigued by the idea of leading a secret life. I know a couple of people who have done that and it fascinates me how they managed it. I have a child I pick up from school, I take the dog for a walk, I go shopping, I write, I act... I wouldn’t have time for a secret life or even trying to organise one!’
He’s the four-time Grammy-nominated legend who has had thousands of shirts ripped off his back and countless G-strings thrown at him on stage. Now Engelbert Humperdinck, the star with the most preposterous name in pop, is desperate to brave his army of adoring fans once again as he goes on tour in the hope of assuaging his grief after Patricia, his beloved wife of 56 years, died in February 2021.
‘I’ll be honest with you, I’m lonely,’ says Engelbert, whose latest album was released on his 87th birthday earlier this month. ‘The only thing I want to do is get back on the road and sing. I want to work as much as I possibly can because I love getting the love from my fans. It gives me the will to live.’
Patricia, who suffered from Alzheimer’s for over a decade before she died, was his rock and his soulmate until she succumbed to a cardiac arrest after overcoming Covid. ‘You don’t realise what you’ve lost until it’s gone,’ he says. ‘After losing Patricia I’ve felt so vulnerable and raw. Your whole thinking changes, your heart changes, your whole world changes. You read lyrics differently. Everything becomes more vivid in your mind and you can portray them in a more sensitive way.
‘So in the show I dedicate a song called Everywhere I Go to her that I wrote about 30 years ago, saying I didn’t realise a lyric could be so poignant at this point in my life. Although I wrote it so long ago I’ve put it back in my show because I’ve dedicated it to my darling, and people love it.’
The new album, called All About Love, is his unique take on some of the greatest love songs of all time, beginning with his first single in a few years – a fresh take on Barry White’s 1974 charttopper You’re The First, The Last, My Everything.
Indeed Engelbert, or Enge as he’s fondly known, is enjoying a bit of a renaissance right now, with a newly recorded version of West Ham United’s football anthem I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles featuring in Brad Pitt’s movie Bullet Train, his 1968 hit A Man Without Love going viral with 15.9 million streams on Spotify after appearing in Disney+ superhero drama
Moon Knight, and Netflix’s comedy fantasy The Umbrella Academy playing Quando, Quando, Quando during a fight scene.
‘When I walk on stage even now, the reaction I get is amazing – they still scream,’ he beams. ‘I’ve also noticed that younger people have started to discover who Engelbert Humperdinck is, so I see a lot of new faces in the front row. I’ll never retire. I just want to keep doing what I do because I love showbusiness.’
It was a chance meeting that led to the love story that spanned 65 years when he and Patricia crossed paths in 1956 at Leicester’s Palais De Danse nightclub when she was 17 and he was 20. Back then, Enge went by his plain old birth name of Arnold Dorsey and was fighting to make a name for himself as a singer. He was so broke that he refused to marry Patricia until 1964, when he’d made enough money to provide for her and the four children – Louise, Jason, Brad and Scott – that followed. It was Patricia who bought him a new pair of shoes when she heard that the Isle of Man was hosting a talent contest, and off they went to try his luck. He won the £75 prize and a free holiday. ‘She was so good to me and she made me feel so good,’ he recalls wistfully. ‘She stood by me all those years. That competition was a great experience. I sang Your Eyes Are The Eyes Of A Woman In Love and I won it. I knew then what I wanted to do.’
But it was a struggle in the early days. Enge was so strapped for cash he ended up sleeping on railway station benches or in freezing cold telephone boxes, unscrewing the light bulb so that passers-by wouldn’t see him shivering inside. ‘It was a hard life, but I think you learn from the hard knocks. One of the worst places I ever slept was a public convenience. When you put a penny in the slot you could stay in there as long as you liked,’ he laughs. ‘But Patricia stood by me even when I got tuberculosis in 1961, which was life-threatening. I spent six months on my back in hospital, and when I tried to get back into the business I was turned down by so many people.’
It was that brush with death that persuaded him to team up with Tom Jones’s manager Gordon
One of the worst places I slept was a public convenience. For a penny you could stay as long as you liked